Duff's device

[T. William Wells]

In article <32941 at cca.CCA.COM> g-rh at CCA.CCA.COM (Richard Harter) writes:
: Now all us good children know that when we write a loop with conditionals
: the compiler does some magic for us -- it creates some labels and transfers
: and tests and maybe does some block allocation.  And it is incumbent upon
: us not to confuse the compiler.  If I declare some variables at the start
: of the loop are they going to be there when I jump into the middle?  This
: is the sort of code that you have to be a language lawyer to be sure that
: it works right -- and you have to assume that the compiler writer was a
: good language lawyer too.  I don't like to write code that requires being
: a language lawyer to read and verify; life is too short.

Pardon, but the question of what happens to local variables when
entering a loop from other than the top has never been an obscure
issue in C.  Both K&R and ANSI assert that the locals will *not*
be initialized, and K&R implies and ANSI explicitly states that
the memory for the locals will be allocated.

I also don't know of any compiler that fails to allocate space in
this situation.  Does anyone know of any?

---
Bill
novavax!proxftl!bill